How to successfully implement business intelligence in your company

Analyse, prioritise, implement

Your organisation has gone through a lot to get to the point of having a newly implemented business intelligence solution, and you are ready to take your business to the next level. This will cause significant changes to occur within your company, so you will need to tackle adoption amongst employees early on. No matter how good the solution is, it is now your job to make everything work and introduce the new solution to your company and employees.

Below, you can find 6 tips on how to successfully implement business intelligence across your company.

Define your needs

In order to start defining your needs, you need to understand what the critical goals for your company are. For example, doubling the revenue, acquiring a bigger market share or expanding the company size. Here, it is essential to consider how your BI tool will help you to achieve these goals. After this, define your key performance indicators (KPIs), which will help you to create guidelines to process and adapt data. It is essential that you prepare for the successful implementation of your BI tool early on, as implementation is far easier when you know what you need to track.

Prepare your team

For every employee to be fully prepared for the changes that will occur after you implement your BI tool, they all need to be informed about the future business plans. You can organise meetings with domain experts who may guide your employees through the implementation process. These advocates know how to get value from business data and can help you train your employees while the implementation occurs.

Take small steps

By introducing the new BI solution to one department at a time, you can stay focused and be more prepared to face possible unforeseen problems. Celebrating quick wins could also convince other employees to adopt the use of the BI tool. While implementing solutions in one department, it may be a good idea to start with only one set of data. Make small but confident moves and proceed towards full implementation.

Keep it simple

The simpler the solution, the easier the implementation. If your business intelligence tool is too complicated, its potential will not be fully unleashed because employees may have difficulties using it efficiently. There are a lot of ways your BI software solution can be simplified. Firstly, be sure that the product you are buying meets all your needs and is user-friendly. Bespoke software has a huge advantage here over out-of-the-box solutions. There are many vital features that facilitate the use of a BI tool. For example, drag-and-drop, natural language processing or visual interface. After choosing the right program, ensure that the training of your employees is kept as simple as possible.

The process of implementing the BI tool should be efficient and a one-time process; however, the benefits of the tool should be long-term.

Clean your data

If you want valuable and reliable answers, you need to provide your software solution with clean data to process. If the data is inconsistent, you will have to spend a lot of time cleaning that data. But what is clean data? To put it simply, your information is entered in a way where your BI software recognises and understands it. Ensuring the data is clean is not complicated and does not require any extraordinary skills, but it must be remembered and used. When data is not clean or correctly uploaded and starts to be processed, reports might be irrelevant, and extra work may need to be done as a result of this.

The tips presented above are vital for the implementation of business intelligence software within any company. It will take time to successfully finish it. Stay open to new propositions and be flexible in order to achieve all your goals. Your software provider should accompany you through this time and be there to help you.